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Ever wondered what news companies are doing to predict the future of media consumption? With the recent trends of decline in print media, this is one of the hot questions for the journalism industry. Today in a post on the New York Times’ Bits blog, the vice president for research and development operations at The New York Times Company, Michael Zimbalast, details his department’s analysis of “weak signals” and consumer trends to extrapolate the impact for the news industry:

The New York Times Company’s research and development department tries to predict the kinds of products and services that will be used two or three years from now. One way we do this is to look for what futurists call “weak signals” — those early signs of change, faintly visible today, whose presence may foretell bigger things to come. While weak signals are never the headliners themselves, they may often be found embedded in larger stories, lurking near the edges, like ultraviolet radiation encroaching on the visible spectrum.

For example, one of the big stories at the Consumer Electronics Show this year was aptly captured in this headline from The Times: “A Deluge of Devices for Reading and Surfing.” Within this roundup of latest e-readers and netbooks were three new products with features that could be portentous.

Two of these products — the Alex from Spring Design and the eDGe from Entourage — have dual screens, one for reading, the other for accessing the Web. The screens can be coupled to form a deep connection between the two experiences. You could, for example, watch a lecture about a literary classic on one of the screens while thumbing through the text on the other.

The third product that caught my eye was the Lenovo Ideapad U1 hybrid PC. This netbook has a detachable display that, when uncoupled from the keyboard, becomes a fully functioning tablet PC. But the orphaned keyboard is hardly brain dead; it contains its own powerful processor capable of driving another display.

All three of these devices are part of a larger trend that I refer to as hardware mashups.

In his blog post, Zimbalast continues by anticipating what this means both for developments in consumer electronics, and subsequently for the news industry:

What this means for media companies like The Times is that the deluge of devices appearing in the market today may soon become as fragmented and customized as the publishing space has become. Our content, therefore, has to be both sticky enough to engage our readers’ attention while being slippery enough to be insinuated into the variegated ecosystem of readers and displays that will be coupled and uncoupled into an unimaginable array of gadgets, built both by traditional manufacturers as well as a new breed of do-it-yourselfers.

Read the full article on The New York Times Bits blog.

This last week FBI Director Robert Mueller renewed its call for Internet service providers to record what websites their customers visit, keeping logs for two years. As Mashable reports:

That would mean monitoring the IP addresses, domains and exact websites users visit, and then storing that information for months. If officials who support this measure get their way, federal, state and local law enforcement would be able to access the information via search warrant or subpoena.

The FBI has made these requests previously, and argues that this would be a modernization of previous laws that have required telephone companies to track call information. CNET News details:

As far back as a 2006 speech, Mueller had called for data retention on the part of Internet providers, and emphasized the point two years later when explicitly asking Congress to enact a law making it mandatory. But it had not been clear before that the FBI was asking companies to begin to keep logs of what Web sites are visited, which few if any currently do.

Greg Motta, the chief of the FBI’s digital evidence section, said that the bureau was trying to preserve its existing ability to conduct criminal investigations. Federal regulations in place since at least 1986 require phone companies that offer toll service to “retain for a period of 18 months” records including “the name, address, and telephone number of the caller, telephone number called, date, time and length of the call.”

While this information would only be accessible with legal authorization such as a suppeona or search warrant, advocates for internet privacy have expressed concerns over potential abuse. In addition, achieving compliance would face a number of technical and legal challenges. From CNET News:

“We’re not set up to keep URL information anywhere in the network,” said Drew Arena, Verizon’s vice president and associate general counsel for law enforcement compliance.

And, Arena added, “if you were do to deep packet inspection to see all the URLs, you would arguably violate the Wiretap Act.”

Another industry representative with knowledge of how Internet service providers work was unaware of any company keeping logs of what Web sites its customers visit.

You can read more from Mashable.com and Cnet News.

Two months ago, the White House Office of Management and Budget released The Open Government Directive which laid out a number of requirements for executive departments and agencies. One of these requirements was to launch an open government website to serve as the gateway for agency activities related to the Directive by today, February 6th. ProPublica is tracking the progress of agency sites going up:

You can find the latest assessment at ProPublica.

In addition to creating an open government website, the OMB laid out a number of other requirements in its directive relating to the publishing of data online, standardizing government information, and institutionalizing government openness. Read more in The Open Government Directive.

The open data movement continues to build as New York City announced the winners of its NYCBigApps competition today. The competition is self-described as “A software application challenge in keeping with New York City’s drive to become more transparent, accessible, and accountable.”

$20,000 in cash prizes is being rewarded between the competition winners, along with the opportunity to have a dinner with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The New York Times’ Bits blog reports:

The competition, which the city’s Economic Development Corporation kicked off in June, gave software developers access to more than 170 sets of data from 30 city agencies, including weekly traffic updates, schedules of citywide events, property sales, results of restaurant inspections and mappable data around school and voting districts.

A panel of judges, which included John Borthwick, chief executive of Betaworks, and Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures, selected 10 winners from a pool of more than 100 entries. Cash prizes totaling $20,000 will be shared among the winning teams, and they will also be invited to a dinner with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Some of the winners included:

• WayFinder NYC, which uses augmented reality to overlay subway symbols on the comara view to help users find the closest subway entrance.
• Taxihack, which lets users comment on individual taxis and drivers by email or Twitter.
• Bookzee, which allows users to conduct a location-based library book search, finding the closest library with the book you are looking for

You can see the complete list of winners in the Application Gallery. Read more from NYCBigApps or The New York Times.

Over on NYTimes.com, Robert Wright has a post today that touches on the impact of technological innovations on the American system of government. His post posits that the internet and other communications technologies have had serious repercussions for the system of representative democracy that the country’s founders created. “The founders explicitly rejected direct democracy — in which citizens vote on every issue — in favor of representative democracy.” If you are interested in politics and technology, his OpEd is definitely worth reading.

He takes a look at the introduction of new technologies, starting with computerized mass mail, that made political organizing and lobbying easier and governing more difficult. “You could now reach out and organize a bunch of previously unorganized people for the primary, if not sole, purpose of lobbying.” He writes further: “The mass-mail revolution had worked its paralyzing magic by lowering the cost of mobilizing far-flung groups of people who share a political interest. Obviously, subsequent technological history hasn’t exactly reversed this trend toward the cheaper processing and transmission of data. The personal computer, the Internet and allied technologies have given a new fluidity to political opposition, spawning interest groups almost overnight in response to policy initiatives.”

Among other things, Wright claims that “Had technological change stopped in 1950, President Obama would be basking in the glow of victory. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies and labor unions posed challenges to health care reform, but their challenges were manageable, and as of a few weeks ago Obama had found a sausage recipe that these groups could stomach.” One of the questions that the founders struggled with, and that led ultimately to the formation of a representative democracy, was the fear of an uniformed citizenry making decisions. So while new technologies have made communication and lobbying more effective, it is also worth analyzing whether these technologies have also served to better inform citizens on the issues being debated in the halls of Congress. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Read the rest at NYTimes.com.

Written by Yussi, the newest intern at Joe Trippi & Associates

Last week President Obama engaged the House Republican Caucus in a 90 minute unscripted exchange, providing substantive insight into the normally obscure Washington policy debates.

This exchange offered the opportunity for the opposition party to meaningfully engage with President Obama–breaking down the political posturing and preaching that is a staple of political press conferences, speeches, and campaign events.

Prompted by this inspiring exchange, I am joining with an impressively diverse group of reporters, bloggers, and politicos to demand that the President and leaders of the Republican Party come together regularly to openly discuss the issues facing our country, in short to “make question time a regular feature of our democracy”. Other early endorsers include Grover Norquist, Eli Pariser, Mark McKinnon, Markos Moulitsas, and Ed Morrissey. And the steering committee is headed by Micah Sifry, David Corn, Mike Moffo, Mindy Finn, Jon Henke and Glenn Reynolds.

This is not a liberal or conservative effort to catch representatives or the President in gotcha moments. This is an effort to truly deepen the dialogue in our political process, to increase transparency, and promote collective action to address the problems facing our country.

Already, President Obama has accepted an invitation to speak to Senate Republicans, and is addressing Senate Democrats this morning in a format open to the press. It is my belief that the more open the political process, and the greater the access the public has to the political discourse, the better the political system will function.

If you believe in this effort, please join me in signing the petition to Demand Question Time.

http://demandquestiontime.com

As mentioned last week, President Obama sat down yesterday with a YouTube moderator to answer follow-up questions to his State of the Union address. The questions were not only sent in by users, but then also ranked by them. Almost 14,500 questions were recorded and 772,000 votes cast in what the White House called the “State of the Union 2.0”. While the format was initially introduced in the CNN/YouTube Debates two years ago, yesterday was a first: never has a sitting president taken questions from citizens via the internet. TechPresident, while not convinced by the quality of the engagement, acknowledges:

“There’s value in having citizens get a chance to question the president, no matter what the questions. There’s an audience out there that might never watch a boring think tank speech by the President on C-SPAN but will dedicate a piece of its afternoon to checking out what Obama has to say on Facebook. And there were questions here and there that elicited some slightly intriguing responses from Obama.”

Steve Grove, who sat down with PBS after his interview with the President described the exchange as “an elevator speech with the president only in video.” Since users could not only submit, but vote on videos, only questions were asked that had attracted interest from other users. “For example in the foreign policy category, the number one question actually was about Sudan which was something, you know, the President didn’t even address in his State of the Union”, said Grove. “This represents the future, the way that our political leaders can easily and efficiently connect with people across the country.”

Read more on Techpresident.com, watch the interview with the President and PBS’s interview with Steve Grove on YouTube.